Portugal, Africa, and the Future
1975; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1017/s0022278x00025374
ISSN1469-7777
Autores Tópico(s)Island Studies and Pacific Affairs
ResumoTwelve years ago, the present writer made an embarrassingly inaccurate forecast. The Portuguese, he wrote in a paperback, cannot hold out for long in Angola; the country is hard to pacify, the insurgents enjoy many advantages, the metropole is poor and incapable of sustaining a long Indonesian-type conflict. 1 At the time, this assessment seemed quite realistic, even to many Portuguese. The left-wing historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho argued that their society lacked ‘social efficiency’; Portugal was a backward country, a land of labour migrants incapable of true development at home, much less of developing an empire. 2 Even some conservatives agreed: the metropole was poverty- stricken, and the colonies were but millstones around Portugal's neck.
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